Dawgs and Mirrors

[Wilson Gray]

That's an elegant description, Larry, of the second syllable as a
syllabic /r/ in the speech of right-thinking Northerners. It makes
obvious how simple a rule can be, yet its application or lack of
application is sufficient to sunder a language into separate dialects
or to merge two distinct dialectical distinctions into one.

-Wilson

On 10/27/06, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Dawgs and Mirrors
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 4:25 PM -0400 10/27/06, Wilson Gray wrote:
> >I still much prefer the Southern / BE disyllabic pronunciation of
> >"mirror," however spelled, to the monosyllabic Northern "mere."
> >
> >-Wilson
>
> Hey, don't lump us all northern eggs in the same northern basket.
> I'm as northern as anyone (well, maybe not as northern as a Mainer or
> North Dakotan) and my "mirror" is definitely disyllabic.  Admittedly
> the second syllable is a syllabic r, so the r basically goes on and
> on, but it's definitely two syllables and the vowel is quite distinct
> from that of "mere".
>
> LH
>
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--
Everybody says, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange
complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is knows how deep
a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our
race. He brought death into the world.

--Sam Clemens

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